CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Kael — What I Almost Lost
I was inside that building before Sable finished telling me Nadia was heading for the stairs, some animal part of me overriding every careful protocol we’d built for exactly the reason Sable had warned me about days earlier — a man thinking clearly doesn’t move like that.
I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was thinking about Renata Voss’s last recorded words, not everyone who works for me shares my patience, and about four years of imagining every possible way I could fail to keep this woman alive, and about how none of those imagined failures had ever included the specific terror of being two floors away when it mattered.
I met her on the second-floor landing, and she was fine — shaken, pale, but fine, walking under her own power with a straightness in her spine that told me the fear hadn’t beaten whatever had carried her through that meeting.
It was the man in the stairwell below us who wasn’t fine with how the meeting had gone.
I saw him before Nadia did — the particular economy of movement I’d learned to recognize in men who did this for a living, closing the distance up the stairs with a speed that meant this wasn’t a conversation he was here to have.
I put myself between him and Nadia without thinking, the way four years of watching from the shadows had never actually prepared me to do in the open, in daylight, with everything at stake instead of nothing.
It was fast, and it was ugly, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of a better story.
He was good. I was better, not because I wanted to be but because my father had made sure of it long before I understood what I was being made ready for, and it ended with him on the ground and Nadia’s hand gripping my arm hard enough to bruise, both of us breathing too fast in a stairwell that suddenly felt very small.
“Are you hurt,” she said, running her hands over me with a frantic thoroughness that told me exactly how frightened she’d actually been, underneath the composure she’d shown Renata Voss.
“No. Are you.”
“No.” Her voice cracked on the word, the adrenaline finally catching up to both of us at once. “Kael, she knows we’re not bluffing. She’s going to come at this harder now, not softer. You said it yourself — either outcome serves her—”
“I know.” I pulled her against me, some instinct older and simpler than four years of careful distance finally winning out over every rule I’d ever set for myself, and she let me, both of us standing in a stairwell with a man unconscious at our feet and eleven days between us and either safety or catastrophe.
“I know, and I’m not letting this be the version where I lose you to a danger I saw coming and still couldn’t stop in time. ”
She pulled back just far enough to look at me, and whatever she found in my face made something in hers soften, fierce and certain in a way I hadn’t let myself hope for yet.
“You’re not going to lose me,” she said. “Not to her, not to any of this. I didn’t survive a month of learning my entire life was a lie just to hand it back to the people who made it one.”
I kissed her then, in that stairwell, adrenaline and fear and four years of wanting finally overriding every careful reason I’d built for waiting — and she kissed me back like she’d been waiting for it just as long, both of us finally choosing, in the middle of the danger instead of in spite of it, the thing we’d both been too careful to reach for until now.
We had eleven days. Somewhere above us, Renata Voss was already recalculating how to make sure we didn’t survive them.